The Best News Of 2014: Nidhogg Releases January 13th

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Have you been asleep over the Christmas break, like we have? Then you might have missed 2014’s most exciting news: Nidhogg is finally being released on January 13th on Steam.

The 2D swordfighting game has been around for over three years – it won the IGF Nuovo award in 2011 – but you’d be forgiven for not being one of the few lucky enough to have been able to play it so far. Now creator messhof has expanded on it and is ready to let everybody have a go.

Come watch the announcement trailer while I prattle a little about why it’s great.

Nidhogg was a local multiplayer game for two people in which each fighter was armed with a sword. The aim was to defeat your opponent, advance to the next screen and repeat the process against your respawned enemy until eventually you were eaten by an enormous flying worm, signalling victory.

The moveset was extremely limited: you could hold and jab your sword from high, mid or low positions; throw it; jump; and slide. But the psychology of the game – the mixture of feints, double-bluffs, high tension and easy failure – made it simultaneously competitive and approachable. When I used to play it with friends, players would be alternately screaming with exertion and laughing in hysterics. The best players invented their own additional moves (with names like “the wildebeest”). Our matches in an open plan office would draw crowds.

This newer version expands the game with tweaked moves, new levels and support for up to eight players in local multiplayer. I will give it all my money, and write more about it as soon as I get the chance to play.

32 Comments

If that video and gameplay is from 2010 I really hope the finished product ends up being incredible, the have certainly had enough time to get the polish in there and get a really solid multiplayer setup going.

Hooray for local multiplayer being an option on a PC game, it’s about time PC games tried to catch up to what console games have always been better at (they’ve still got a long way to go though). PC games should have become better than console games for local (by which I mean single machine) multiplayer by now since we can have multiple screens (something only one? console has really started [somewhat] trying to do).

Yes it is nice to have the option for online multiplayer but it’s just as frustrating when there’s a lack of local multiplayer in a game which is suited to it, perhaps more frustrating since local multiplayer should (perhaps; I don’t know the details of the coding) be simpler to include since you don’t have to sort out how to connect multiple machines.

Due to the depreciation of this product since its original reveal, I feel that messhof should give us all lots of money to play it. Nonetheless, I suspect he will be the one getting all of the money.

I just hope he asks a realistic price, uninflated by its collection of dusty awards. Given that EGGNOGG achieved parody and an extremely enjoyable game the best part of a year ago (link to freeindiegam.es), the finished Nidhogg had better surpass expectation…

Watching that brings one game to mind: Bruce Lee (C64/Spectrum). 2 player on one machine, two fighting characters (Green Yamo and Bruce), one of them trying to get further while the infinitely respawning other player did all they could to interfere. With an AI ninja thrown in as a wildcard. I still play Bruce Lee regularly – you owe it to yourself to download a copy and play it on an emulator, ideally with Kempston-type joysticks.

Yep, that’s the only way I played it. You just chose it from the options screen. link to grebz.fr (choose 2 player, then Opponent mode – otherwise you are both Bruce Lee and just take it in turns, boring).

What a lovely remake! I liked the fidelity of the re-made version (in terms of sound and timing being spot on) but the roof graphics make it harder to tell where you can walk safely in the first screens. It made a nice change, though the C64 graphics are my favourite. Bruce Lee is one of those games I can complete in 20 minutes, and I usually have about a 40% chance of succeeding if I haven’t played it for a year or so, which feels like a nice challenge.

Nowadays some games even control where you look; back then they didn’t even care how you played two player. Competitive or co-op; adventure or single screen brawls. Totally up to you. The game was just the backdrop.

Wow, for some reason I really want to eat a lot of LSD and watch that gameplay video on repeat until my brain burns itself out. Not sure whether that’s a nod of approval towards Nidhogg or more of an indication of deep-seated mental issues.

Local multiplayer is nice but I am not a kid anymore and getting friends over to play video games just doesn’t happen. Add online functionality and I will get it. Local only means a pass for me thoughmost likely.

Holy crap, I get that quality gameplay trumps on everything etc, but some of these indie developers could at least make a minimum effort in making their work look any decent.
I’m not asking for Crysis 3 graphics, but at least try something clean and charming, not amateurish pixellated silhouettes.

I Like how Eggnog, A game that was made as a parody in like a week, still looks stylistically better then a game thats been fucking about in development for years. It all just looks so jerky and meh, unlike the happy, smooth little sprites of Eggnog.

With this and Samurai gunn coming out it it seems to be the winter of Overhyped, overpriced, local multiplayer only, glorified flash games that could have realistically been coded in a weekend. Fun games, mind, but it boggles the mind how something like THIS could have had a longer dev cycle then Hotline Miami or Shadow Warrior or any number of other games.